V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Roger, speaking with an unusual irritation, possibly as a result of something that had happened during his business conversation, said provocatively, “I think it’s rather nice.”

The banker said, “It’s yours. I’ll give it to you.”

Roger said, “It will be too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll get them to wrap it up and see it into the train with you. I am sure Perdita will find some use for it.”

That was what happened the next afternoon. So the first-class tickets that Roger had bought at last had the witness for whom they had been intended, and Roger was spared the most horrible kind of shame. But again, at tipping time, he lost his nerve and tipped the servant ten pounds.

He said to Willie, “All the way in the car I was trying to work out the tip. For everything extra connected with that odious vase. I settled on five pounds, but at the last minute I changed my mind. It’s all the effect of that man’s ego. I allow him to insult me, as he did with that cracked vase, and then I try to find excuses for him. I think, ‘He’s like a child. He doesn’t know about the real world.’ One day someone with nothing to lose will insult him in the profoundest way, and then the magic will be broken. But until then for people like me there’s an electric charge around the man.”

Willie said, “Do you think you will be the one to insult him in that profound way when the moment comes?”

“Not now. I have too much to lose. I am too dependent on him. But at the end, yes. When my father was dying in hospital his character completely changed. This very gentlemanly man began to insult everybody who came to see him. My mother, my brother. He insulted all his business associates. Really vile language. He said everything he thought about everybody. He kept nothing back. The nearness of death gave him that licence. I suppose you would say that for my father death was his truest and happiest moment. But I didn’t want to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh, according to what I’ve read. Peacefully smoking a pipe, reconciled to everybody and everything, hating no one. But Van Gogh could afford to be romantic. He had his art and vocation. My father didn’t, and I don’t, and very few of us have, and now that I am within sight of the end I find myself thinking that my father had something. It makes death something to look forward to.”

When they got back to the house in St. John’s Wood Roger said to Perdita, “Peter has sent you a gift.”

She was excited, and immediately began undoing the servant’s unskilled and perfunctory wrapping (a lot of sticky tape) of the awkwardly shaped, tall vase.

She said, “It’s a lovely craft piece. I must write to Peter. I have a place for it. The crack needn’t show.”

For a few days the vase was where she put it, but then it disappeared and wasn’t spoken of again.

A WEEK OR so later Roger said to Willie, “You made a great hit with Peter. Did you know?”

Willie said, “I wonder why. I hardly said anything to him. I just listened.”

“That’s probably why. Peter has a story about Indira Gandhi. He never thought much of her. He didn’t think she was educated or knew much about people in the wider world. He thought she was a bluffer. In 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh business, he went to Delhi and tried to see her. He had some project on hand. She ignored him. He twiddled his thumbs in his hotel for a whole week. He was furious. At last he met someone from the inner Indira Gandhi circle. He asked this person, ‘How does the lady judge people?’ The person said, ‘Her method is simple. All the time she is waiting to see what her visitor wants.’ Peter no doubt took the tip. He was waiting all the time to find out what you wanted from him, and you said nothing.”

Willie said, “I didn’t want anything from him.”

“It brought out the best in him. He talked to me about you afterwards, and I told him some of your story. The result is he’s made you an offer. He’s involved with some big construction companies. They do a quality magazine about modern buildings. It’s high-class public relations. They don’t overtly sell any company or product. He thinks you might want to work for them. Part-time or full-time. It depends on you. The offer is perfectly genuine, I should tell you. It’s Peter at his best. He’s very proud of his magazine.”

Willie said, “I know nothing about architecture.”

And Roger knew that Willie was interested.

He said, “They do courses for people like you. It’s like the courses the auction houses do in art history.”

SO WILLIE AT last found a job in London. Or found something to go to in the mornings. Or, to make it still smaller, something to leave the St. John’s Wood house for.

The magazine’s offices were in a narrow, flat-fronted old building in Bloomsbury.

Roger said, “It’s like something out of central casting.”

Willie didn’t know the meaning of the words.

Roger said, “In the old days in Hollywood the studios had departments that did exaggerated sets of foreign places. Exaggerated and full of cliché so that people would know where they were. If somebody — doing A Christmas Carol , say — had gone to them and asked for a Dickensian office in a Dickensian building they would have built something like your building and enveloped it in fog.”

It was not far from the British Museum — pediment and columns, big front court and tall, pointed, black iron rails. And it wasn’t far from the Trades Union Congress building, tight against the street, modern, three or four storeys high, glass and concrete in rectangular segments, with a strange cantilevered flying figure in bronze above the entrance, representing labour threatening or labour triumphant, or perhaps only labour or the idea of work, or perhaps again representing mainly the sculptor’s struggle with his socialist subject.

Willie walked past that sculpture every day. For the first few weeks, until he ceased to see it, he felt rebuked: his work on the magazine was really very soft, and for a large part of every day was hardly work at all.

It was a part of London that Willie knew from twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before. Once the associations would have been shameful; now it didn’t matter. The publisher who had done his book was in one of the big black squares. Willie had thought the building undistinguished. But then he was surprised, as he went up the front steps, to find that the building appeared to be growing bigger; and then the interior, behind the old black brick, was lighter and finer than anything he might have expected. Upstairs, in what would have been the main room in the old days, as the publisher told him, he was made to stand in front of the high window of what had been the drawing room and to look down into the square, and the publisher made him imagine the carriages and servants and footmen of Vanity Fair . Why did he do that? Was it just, in the grand first-floor room, to create the picture of the wealth of merchants and traders in the high days of slavery? He did that, of course; but he wished to make another point as well. It was that, in such a room in Vanity Fair , the rich merchant wished to compel his son to marry a black or mulatto heiress from St. Kitts. Was the publisher saying that for those rich men money overrode everything else, overrode even a man’s duty to his race? Was he saying, then, to take the other slant, that their attitude to money gave them, in racial matters, a kind of purity? No, he was saying no such thing. He was speaking critically. He was speaking like a man letting Willie into a national secret. What did he mean? Was he saying that a mulatto heiress should be shunned by all right-minded men? Willie (whenever, in Africa, he thought of his poor little book) had also gone on to ponder the publisher’s gloss on Vanity Fair . And he had decided that the publisher meant nothing at all, that he was only trying in Willie’s presence to give himself a point of view, was trying to work up a little anger about the rich and the treatment of blacks and mulattos at one and the same time, something he would forget when his next visitor came into the room.